1. They aren’t the easy girls. They aren’t the ones that wait around for you or make you a priority the minute you come into their life. The kind of woman worth pursuing doesn’t drop everything for you just because you happen to be there. They make you work for it. They wait until they get to know you and can tell you will be a good thing for them. Then they open up.

2. You’ll never be the only important thing in her life. I’ve dated women who make their whole world revolve around you and it never worked out because at the end of the day, I don’t want someone who comes in second place in her own life. Every relationship should strive for self-sacrificial love, but it’s not self-sacrificing if you never value yourself to begin with. This is why I date women who have something to lose by loving someone else. They aren’t looking to be completed so when they do make sacrifices for you, it actually means something.

3. She knows how to fight right. She doesn’t blame or cut you down. She is generous when it is most difficult — when she is angry at you.

4. She is stronger than anyone else you know. The quiet strength that you can only see by looking very closely at someone’s life, not the kind that makes a big show and demands to be seen. She is strong when no one is watching. She keeps going when things don’t go her way. She is kind to those who are rude to her. She charts her own course in unfamiliar territory.

5. She looks at you like you are worth loving and like she will never stop loving you.

6. She acts grateful, not entitled to the things she has in life. She wishes for her friends and coworkers to be as successful and happy as she is, rather than always competing with them, trying to be better.

7. They love food, love laughter, love sex, love conversation. They are sensual and in touch with their bodies wants and needs. They aren’t grossed out by their body or your body or the occasional sickness or unpleasant human body thing. They enjoy all the appetitive joys of being human.

8. She will make you feel lucky, but she will never tell you you should feel lucky.

9. She doesn’t play games with you. And you trust that she won’t because she isn’t the kind of girl to talk about one “creepy stalker” or another. If she doesn’t like a guy, she communicates that to him. She wouldn’t lead someone on for an occasional ego boost. She doesn’t need that.

10. You don’t have to worry about her cryptic social media messages. If she’s mad at you she tells you why. If she has a problem in her life she fixes it. She doesn’t even know what a ‘subtweet’ is.

11. The words “happy wife, happy life” have never, and will never enter her vocabulary.

12. She doesn’t nag. Nagging is unhealthy and is the fastest way to become unhealthy in a relationship. Nagging is the result of a lack of trust and respect — she assumes you’re an idiot who needs to be mommy-ed into doing something.

13. She will teach you what love is. What it really is. Not what movies or the internet want you to believe love is, but the freedom that comes with actually loving someone and being loved by them. She makes it all worth it.